


The Myth and the Man

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 22:46:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1281583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony gives Steve a copy of his own legend, as written by the Howling Commandos. Of course, the legend is built around the silences - and the silences all wear Bucky's face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Myth and the Man

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky is not an actual character in this, except in memory. (So, if you're optimistic, it occurs in the post-Captain America's return pre-Winter Soldier reveal world?) The timeline is a mix of movie-verse and my general ignorance.
> 
> This was originally tied to a prompt about one of the Commandos asking, "What will you do when the war's over?" but it's spiralled off and I don't remember the original prompt.
> 
> Also, I don't have a beta, so please feel free to assist by pointing out errors!

Tony insisted that it was a book. Or a potential book. A machine that held books? Even after spending the war with Howard – _especially_ after spending the war with Howard – Steve found himself wary of the Stark smile, its own intricate blend of brilliance and bullshit. Jarvis also promised it was a book, though, and despite knowing that Tony had built Jarvis, Steve found it easier to believe the disembodied voice.

It helped that Jarvis couldn't smile.

And Steve was doing fine in this new world. He _was_ . He had spent nearly a month trapped in a SHIELD facility, mornings learning about computers and bombs made from atoms and credit cards to spend his years of back pay. In the afternoons he was left to the psychologists, who wanted to know how he _felt_ about all these plastic toys. In the evenings, Tony and the others had decided to bring every movie made after 1945 into his cell – room – and then argue loudly over all of them.

By now, Steve could go shopping on his own, disable a modern bomb, and hum the theme song to _Star Wars_. The psychologists had finally left him alone; it had been easier during the war, when he got a night off and a bottle of whiskey, and no one ever asked why he woke up shouting for someone who wasn't there.

So he was in the tower, waiting for the world to end. Tony had found him in the kitchen, looking far too innocent for a Stark, and handed him a . . .phone? Computer? Modern technology still wasn't one of his strengths. Bucky would have understood it. Bucky took to anything new like a duck to water, whether it was learning Polish or how to make a parachute out of a tablecloth. Tony had watched Steve prod the device, and rolled his eyes. “Look, Cap, here.” He took the object away and tapped on it a few times, pulling up a screen with a list. “They're books. I downloaded some for you, to catch you up on our magical future.” Steve said thank you automatically, the same way he had when Natasha had given him a knife and Fury had returned his shield, when Dum Dum had given him the last of the scotch, knowing that it wouldn't do any good.

Then he'd looked at the list of titles. _The Internet for Idiots._ _Talk 2U: What Parents Can Do to Understand their Cyber-Kids. Sex: Why Aren't You Having Any? How to Age Gracefully. Intimacy after Fifty: Everything You Need to Know about Safe Sex for Seniors._

“Tony!” But Tony had some sense, it seemed, and all Steve heard in return was the elevator doors sliding shut.

Thankfully, there appeared to be another page of titles. More jabs at his age, his sensibilities – and hidden at the bottom of the list, a familiar name. _The Myth and the Man: Captain America, through the Eyes of His Soldiers_.

Steve tapped on it, accidentally opened _New and Inspiring Positions for the Well-Endowed_ , and politely asked Jarvis to rectify his mistake. He would have done it, but he couldn't maneuver the tablet with his hands over his eyes.

The cover was one of the press photos he'd let them take in London, along with a few scripted newsreels. Then he noticed the Commandos in the background, and frowned. Maybe it wasn't one of the early photos, after all. He couldn't seem to keep his memories straight, these days. Bucky's sly smiles bled over into campfires during the war, even though Steve _knew_ that the only time Bucky smiled after Zola was during battle, a sharp, feral grin that bore no resemblance to the easy smiles he recalled.

Steve had wanted the team in press photos: it was their fight as much as his. (He had wanted a picture of Bucky done in real ink, not smudged charcoal lines, but Captain America didn't manipulate newsreels for keepsakes, didn't upset the cart just to get his best friend's sarcastic tone recorded for eternity. Sometimes, Steve considered, Captain America was a colossal fool.)

Bucky had shaken his head, lips thin. “Sure, Steve, let's all tell Hydra exactly what we look like. Make their jobs a little easier.” And so Steve had pulled the cowl on, posed with the shield, and . . .he still had no idea how the Commandos had gotten into the picture. Either his memory was going, or it was another of those tricks modern technology played.

Steve carried the computer-book back into the common room, where Clint seemed to be trying to teach Thor how to wave a remote at the television, and Natasha and Pepper were either discussing Stark Industries' next merger, or how to conquer a hostile country with ingenuity and some carefully applied lipstick. Bruce offered him a beer, and Tony stole the small computer and read enough to shatter his excitement. “I offer you the future – I offer you _sex_ – and you're more interested in yourself?”

Bruce cleared his throat. Pepper raised her eyebrow, and spoke over Steve's stuttering. “Gee, Tony, sounds sort of familiar.”

Unfazed, her boyfriend folded his arms and retorted, “I'm much more interesting than Capsicle, here. In and out of bed!” Clint responded, and Steve left them to it, settling on the floor by Bruce's leg and returning to his own legend.

 

The authors had done their research. There were pictures on nearly every page, quotes from reports Steve had written and promptly forgotten, interviews with each of the surviving Commandos. Peggy – with her husband and daughter in the inset picture, lines around her eyes visible only because she was smiling so brightly, part of a past that Steve should have lived – spoke about her plane trips with Captain America, one at the beginning of his career and one, by radio, at the end. She said that he was determined to save the 107th, and the authors speculated that it was his big heart, his loyalty to his father's regiment.

It never seemed to occur to them that he hadn't intended to rescue the 107th at all, because he hadn't been thinking of anything but pale eyes and dark hair and the smell of cigarettes and sea air from the docks, a callused hand pressed over his weak lungs or helping him to his feet after a fight. Erskine had known that Steve wanted to be a good man, Col. Phillips had known that Steve wanted to be a hero. Peggy, smarter than both of them, knew Steve's greatest desire had been lost somewhere in the Alps.

She didn't say so, though. Neither did the Commandos. If it weren't for Steve's memories, he would have wondered if Bucky had been there at all. Morita, in his way, bulldozed over questions about his sergeant, while Jones spoke carefully around them, and Dernier pretended not to understand.

Bucky had hated the press. The few photos they had found were grainy, a black spot off Captain America's right that could have been anyone. The newsreels had hired a stand in, some Army brat that couldn't have been more than sixteen years old. Bucky wouldn't go near a camera, wouldn't sign an autograph on the street, would shoot a journalist before he'd speak to one.

“ _Why won't you just come with me?” Steve pleaded, feeling dangerously close to stomping his foot and pouting. “It's one interview. People want to hear about what we're doing.”_

“ _They want to hear about what_ you're _doing,” Bucky corrected, blowing a smoke ring past Steve's cheek. He was stretched out on his cot, legs crossed at the ankles. “What would they want me for, when they have Captain America?”_

“ _Are you_ jealous _?” Steve should have known better than to ask, but he was tired and hot and didn't want to go do another interview, didn't want to go anywhere if he couldn't be sure that his best friend was safe. Bucky's thin shirt didn't hide the gauze wrapped around his shoulder, or the bruising on his ribs from their last mission. He still should have known better – between one breath and the next he was face down on the concrete floor, his arms tugged painfully behind him. Bucky might not be as strong as Captain America, or as quick, but he knew Steve Rogers like the back of his hand, knew every fear and quirk and weak point that could bring a hero down._

“ _Sure,” Bucky agreed, letting Steve up after knuckling his skull and rubbing hard. “I want to wear spangles and stockings and make all the girls swoon.”_

_Bucky made all the girls swoon anyway, but Steve knew there was no point in saying that. “So then why won't you come? It makes people happy, and if they can broadcast to Europe then maybe the Resistance can hear them, and the Americans want to hear -”_

“ _Not fighting for them, am I?” Bucky replied, brushing past Steve and heading for the door. He'd glanced back on his way out, shaking his head and giving Steve one of those smiles that didn't touch his eyes._

Had that really happened? It wasn't in the book, of course, but neither was the quiet conversation they'd had in the bar, where Bucky had told Steve who he _was_ fighting for. The Commandos said so little, the reports said even less, and all the words Steve should have said – the rousing speeches he should have given, the bar fights he shouldn't have started in those black weeks after Bucky had fallen – overlaid his fading memories.

Falsworth chatted with the interviewer about a dreadfully cold mission in Hungary. Steve could still remember inhaling air like ice, the men all bedded down in a pile while the soldier on watch tried to keep the fire burning. He remembered sliding his mouth over chapped lips and stubble, his hand down army-issued pants that weren't his own. He whispered endearments. He confessed things he knew he had never said.

If it wasn't for the remembered shame like a lead slug in his gut, he would think it hadn't happened at all. Steve had had everything, and had hated himself for wanting it – those were the memories he couldn't escape, the pieces of Captain America they left out of the history books.

The Captain America the Commandos _did_ talk about was already a myth, three decades frozen and starting to haze in their own recollections. He was a cartoon of himself: braver, stronger, more generous. Steve had never given up a trip to the tropics to stay with the team - though, to be fair, no one had ever offered him one.

If Bucky had been alive, he could have told them about how Steve hogged the covers and pushed the team too hard until Dum Dum got pneumonia, how he never made a fall-back plan and could draw anything but a decent map. If Bucky had been alive, he would have been on that plane, and Steve would have found a way to save them. Peggy hadn't mentioned that, in her stories. Hadn't said that Captain America didn't even try to find a way out, that he had never intended to survive the war.

The Commandos had spent three years with him, had been intimately acquainted with his sharp temper and his orneriness, but they had also looked to him for orders and guidance, seen him to be more than human. And clearly, Steve realized as he read further, had seen him as exceptionally oblivious. 

As time passed, apparently Captain America became more absent-minded, stories recalled and refashioned to fit his look of bemusement. It was an expression he'd worn in a fair number of pictures – smiling reflexively when someone shoved a camera in his face was a 21st-century development – and one he'd worn often enough when he walked into a bunker or tent and everyone started laughing. He had shot up half a foot and gained ten stone, but he'd never managed to grow out of his role as Bucky's straight man. (Accused of telling tall tales, Barnes would smile. “Sure I do,” he'd answer, when pressed. “You should've seen Stevie before I made him up.”)

 

Somehow he had nearly reached the end of the book, as close to the Alps as Steve ever got outside of his nightmares. It was night outside, one of dozens they spent huddled around a sputtering campfire, looking less like heroes and more like the men Steve remembered living under the Bridge in New York. Their dinner rations had been shot off Morita's pack, and it turned out that Dernier was the only one who knew how to hunt for food, except he had never actually _caught_ anything.

Bucky was their sharpshooter, and he and Jacques had spent the last of the daylight attempting to bring back dinner.

“Mon dieu! Shoot!”

“At what, you oversized Frog? The bush?”

“There ees a rabbit in that bush! Are you blind as well as stupid?”

“Incidentally, we never went rabbit hunting in Brooklyn! Where'd it go?”

“Eet ran away, Sergeant Barnes, like any sensible creature would do upon hearing your voice!”

“Look, Don Juan, just find me something we can eat before you have to sniff us up some truffles!”

It had been dark before the two trudged back to camp, dragging a deer between them, giddy with success. Dernier sang a song that Steve gathered was about someone named Alouette and her neck while he skinned their dinner.

Captain America, of course, was far too oblivious to glance over and see Bucky's face turn an untoward chartreuse as Dernier's knife glinted in the firelight, or watch his hand shift up to rub at the scars Zola had left on his chest. If Steve chose that moment to walk across the circle and crowd his oldest friend . . . well, legends weren't always clear on the details.

Asking Barnes about his latest conquest brought some color to pinched lips, and set in motion an unlikely tale about Inga _and_ Hilda that made a few team members rearrange themselves in the telling. Though it seemed the Commandos thought – _hoped_ \- that Captain America hadn't noticed, too quaint and well-raised to realize. No one seemed to consider that Steve and Bucky had raised each other, in orphanage corners and on city streets.

They wolfed down dinner, tearing venison off bones, stars vivid above them while the trees around them shone with eyes. Bucky looked at Steve and lifted an eyebrow: at their dinner, at the shooting of it, at the three-day-old beards and the log they sat on and the still unfamiliar smell of woodsmoke and pine. Steve laughed and muttered, “I don't think this is Kansas.”

“I'd settle for Queens,” his friend riposted, and their team mates had stared in confusion. Which might be why that conversation wasn't in the book. If Steve had even said it aloud.

Myths have a way of working backward, starting with the grand finale and shrouding their beginnings in the mist. Legend had it that Captain America sprang fully-formed from Erskine's machine, built from sunshine and patriotism, and immediately acquired a plucky young sidekick to go adventuring with him. Legend was relying too heavily on the fake newsreels and the actor playing Bucky, and had never seen a scrap of a seven-year-old boy drag an asthmatic ten year old to the orphanage roof, looking for the end of the world.

“ _There it is! Over there, you see? Where there aren't any buildings. I bet they have cowboys there. Or Chinamen!” Dark eyes had strained toward the horizon, while small, grubby hands waved frantically in that direction._ “Steve,” _the child hissed at his companion, who hadn't been able to straighten up, “you're not even looking! It's the edge of the world!”_

 _The older boy was still holding onto the ladder, gasping for air that seemed much thinner five stories high. Prodded by small fingers, he unfolded himself long enough to glance up at the horizon and scowl. “That's_ Queens, _you. Pinhead,” he wheezed, before crumpling in an undignified faint._

Or, at least, that was what Steve remembered. But no one had written it down, and it was only as vivid as the words he knew he'd never said.

 

After the topic of women had been exhausted (which took hours, and the bottle of gin somehow unshattered in Falsworth's pack), Jones jabbed a branch into the smoldering fire and wondered, “What will you all do when the war's over?”

It was a valid question, at that point: the Allies had liberated Paris and the Commandos were running out of Hydra plants to destroy. The last one had been manned by ordinary soldiers, shooting Howitzers instead of lasers. They still needed Zola dead – Steve still needed to watch Zola die, preferably to do the job himself - and the Red Skull, but they were on their way to catch the former, and getting to the latter was only a matter of time.

Everyone turned to look at Captain America, as though they were waiting for battle strategies and not chewing the fat, sleepy and half-drunk, around a dying fire. “Uh -” and there was that famous expression “- what about you, Gabe? Go back to school?”

Jones lit up, the book said. Legend would call it foreshadowing, the enthusiasm for his dream to study at Cambridge, to one day teach at Harvard. Coincidences too unbelievable for fiction! Only, legend would need to substitute 'Yale' for Cambridge, and 'Vanderbilt' for Harvard, because what good was foreshadowing if it wasn't true? Bucky could have taught the authors a thing or two about epics – he'd created Captain America, after all.

Steve remembered Dugan saying something about introducing himself to every available woman on the continent, but this book had him replying demurely about starting a farm. And Steve was certain that though the words 'sowing' and 'plowing' had been mentioned with some fairly graphic hand gestures, none of it had been about farming. Dernier actually had spoken about his family hiding in France, but Morita had come up with at least seven possible – but extremely unlikely – futures before Falsworth cut him off by pointing out that Jim was not, in fact, Rudolph Valentino.

Steve was afraid to keep reading – glancing up to note that Clint had given up bickering with Tony in favor of snuggling with Phil, and Bruce and Tony were discussing the schematics of something that appeared to be a constellation – because the stories were wrong but close enough, as true or as false as the shaky terrain of his own memories. Maybe he and Bucky had never climbed onto that rooftop, almost eighty years ago. Maybe Falsworth hadn't said he wanted to train show dogs to piss on fascists, but _had_ waxed eloquent about rebuilding England. There was a photo tucked next to the print, of an old man staring out over a cityscape, the starting point for Falsworth's own myth. He was a symbol for England by then, not the aristocrat with no sense of tact that Steve had nearly shoved off a cliff when they were both young.

 _The Myth and the Man_ wasn't really about Captain America. It was about heroes Captain America had never had the chance to meet. The heroes he recalled had not continued becoming what they were. He had known a group of overgrown boys, ready to face death with a smile and an unprintable remark about someone's mother. Old men had written this book. They remembered Captain America, but they also remembered sagas that Steve had never lived, and considered legacies meant to be handed forward, not read by a man almost a century dead searching for the truth in his memories.

They had thought of Captain America's legacy, too, and made him wiser and gentler, though they also made him far more ignorant. As though any boy raised on city streets and in thin-walled tenements would ever squint in befuddlement when someone brought up sex, or be surprised that people quite enjoyed it.

Because they drew Captain America as sweet, and forthright, and apparently dizzy over Peggy Carter, he answered Jones' question with a stuttered, “Uh, it'd be nice to settle down, I think. Maybe somewhere with a white picket fence, and a yard. Get married, have a few kids. I think I'd be a good policeman?”

“In those tights?” Dugan had whistled. “I'd turn to crime just to let you cuff me.” That wasn't in the book, but Steve knew it had happened, if only because he tried not to remember having said something that stupid about his own future, so close to the shadow of the Alps.

Steve hoped his old teammates had kept more memories than the ones they wrote down, that they had winked at each other over the biographers' heads and remembered the vulgar, raucous joy of being young and invincible, felt the brilliance of it again even if they had not shared it with the world.

The worst part was that though Steve had not been particularly sweet, or sweet on Peggy, he had in fact mumbled some ludicrous plan for dogs and children and a career in law enforcement. He had panicked, not wanting to admit that he had never thought far enough beyond _joining_ the Army to consider leaving it. Not wanting to admit that what he had been thinking about was the way his second in command looked sprawled out by the fire, all muscular grace and shadowed eyes.

In the book, everyone nodded, their responses shaded with a solemnity that warned the most inattentive readers that Captain America would never have his picket fence, or his beautiful, auburn-haired wife. Nods that obscured Bucky's reaction entirely. Was it possible that the Commandos hadn't seen Bucky fold over as if he had been punched below the belt? Or did they simply think that Captain America hadn't seen his – his _best_ _friend_ shudder and clamp pale hands down on a rifle he wasn't holding?

Either the Commandos were idiots, or they believed Captain America had been one. On watch at night they could not have helped but hear their captain and sergeant move against each other in ways Steve would never admit. Ways he had never admitted meant more than the pine needles they laid on, had swallowed any words he should have said and sealed his lips over Bucky's.

If they somehow hadn't heard Captain America moan while Sgt. Barnes bit his lip bloody, the Commandos had all watched their fearless leader fall apart in London when they delivered Zola into Phillips' hands. Steve had never dreamed of a career in the NYPD, as Tony called it. He _had_ dreamed of settling into a house with Peggy – though he was always less clear on what role Peggy played than that Bucky would live right next door.

Either way, neither the Commandos nor Steve himself could have missed the way Bucky had reacted to Captain America's foolish, hasty pronouncement. Steve's memories had to be true, because they were so neatly left out of the memoirs, and because they were the only words he wished he _hadn't_ said. Bucky had bent nearly to his splayed knees, curling into a ball and then spiraling to his unsteady feet. “Did you fuckers forget about watch?” he'd berated them, voice hoarse. “Won't matter what you do when the war's over if the Red Skull picks us all off tonight.”

They had taken the hint. Taken in Bucky's pale face, and his trembling hands, and slunk off to their bedrolls and to bed. And Steve had been grateful that his friend would be standing first watch, grateful that he wouldn't have to explain himself or his fabricated dreams.

The next day, they had climbed to the top of a mountain and waited silently for the whistle of a German train. Bucky had stood away from the dog pile they'd formed for warmth, arguing he had the best long-distance vision of the bunch. And Steve had let him, _grateful_ for the reprieve.

 

The Commandos said little about the next few months, and the biographers were left trying to fill in the gaps. There were general newsreels from the war, articles about how Sgt. Barnes had been KIA, about Zola's capture and the interrogation.

Somewhere far away, decades out of place, Bruce replaced his empty beer with a full glass of gin. Banner must have seen where the book led. Tony kicked him half-heartedly, and then turned his attention to fighting Pepper over the Board members' salaries, mostly about his own.

Steve realized the Captain America newsreels ended after the Alps. He must have stopped showing up. He didn't remember anyone asking. He didn't remember planning the final attack with Phillips, either, or laying the plan out to the Commandos.

He remembered his bunk in London, the smell of starched sheets and the cot that didn't creak when only he laid on it. _When the war's over_ , he remembered telling the cracked and moldy concrete ceiling, so many levels under a shattered city, _when the war's over I'm going back to Brooklyn. And – and back to where we were._ If he went back to Brooklyn, Bucky would be there waiting, cocky smile twitching over full lips, a day or two of stubble where he'd forgotten to shave. And they would be poor, working at the docks and picking up the late shift in bars, taking extra wages where they could. Steve would never have a yard, or a fence, or a wife. But he would wake up every morning and see a familiar smirk and feel the first shadings of a beard scrape down his neck, and it would be the only future he'd ever wanted.

 

“Hey.” Tony nudged him in the shin, surprisingly gentle, nodding at his empty glass. “It's bedtime for superheroes. You need a refill on that sludge?”

Steve shook his head, holding on to the phone – tablet? book? - in one hand as he rose to his feet. He didn't live in Brooklyn any more, and even sitting around a campfire during the war the Commandos had known Captain America would never realize his dreams.

He brushed his teeth with the new, plastic, whirring toothbrush, and flossed when Jarvis reminded him. Once he settled into bed, Steve couldn't help flipping through the book one more time to search for Bucky. There were few mentions, and even fewer photos. One where the cameraman must have surprised them in the canteen, because Bucky's face was relaxed, the ever-present cigarette tucked loosely between his lips, caught in the middle of some fabulous story.

Bucky could do that, spin a tale over salted meat and canned carrots about men who were more than human and women too beautiful to be true, while his sniper's gaze focused on some distant point. In this photo, it was the other side of the mess, where Steve was halfway across the room, still trying to reach the table when they'd taken the shot.

_I would spend forever with you, if I could. Bucky, I -_

But the Commandos knew Steve had never said anything, no matter what he imagined. They knew that he had washed his own clothes in camp, ashamed of the evidence he might have left, that he'd insisted on sleeping in his own bedroll across the fire from Barnes for the rest of each night. They had made him a bit stupid, and it was a kindness on their part to make him an idiot instead of the coward he had been.

And they had left Bucky to the quiet he had earned, the peace Steve had never offered him. When the biographers mentioned Sgt. Barnes, the book could only say, “'Dernier smiled, graceful and sad, and shook his head.' 'Falsworth rubbed his chin, and launched into a fantastic story about several crates of explosives that went missing in 1943 outside Paris.'”

Steve hoped they remembered Bucky, though they never mentioned him. If Sgt. Barnes had deserved his peace, he had also deserved the silent memorial of the old men gathered again in a single room to tell their stories. Steve would never be privy to what his soldiers might have whispered, too soft and canny for the biographers to hear. What they might have said about the other man they had lost.

Bucky, who told fables and tall tales with the same agility that locked his fingers around the barrel of gun, his leg hooked over the limb of scrawny pine. Bucky, who would have known how to spin out the future Steve hadn't dared to dream.

He flipped off the light, and accidentally reset the book to some earlier page as he went to leave it on the night stand. It lit up, obligingly, and Steve found himself glancing at the title page. He tried to blink the light from his eyes, fumbling the tablet, and the image dissolved into a few words.

And if Steve slept with the book tucked to his chest – well, there was no one left to see. Captain America may have been glad for their silence, but Steve Rogers was grateful to know that his soldiers saw what he had never had the courage to say.

 

_Dedicated to Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes,_

_who invented Captain America,_

_loved Steve Rogers_

_and always had the best words for us all_

 


End file.
